Joseph Roth- a Life in Letters

by Michael Hofmann

  5. You say, may God free me from money. Not so, dear friend! May God give me money, a shed load of money! Because in today’s world money is no curse any more, and poverty no blessing. To put it bluntly, that’s “romantic.” (Quite apart from the fact that I’m not poor, but something that’s grim and in-between.) I need money! I write with money, I help six or seven people to get by with my money, which isn’t “gold” any more, and so isn’t a curse! It’s a figment! What’s real is my work, and the lives of those dear to me. I’ve never earned as much as a Wassermann,2 but I’ve never lived like him either. And the people who live at my side—apart from my poor wife—they’re already living like “proles.” And I can’t even afford to keep them like that. I can’t eat decently. Show me the prole who lives as badly as I do!—And above all, where did you see a prole doing such important work as we do?—Even our nearest and dearest, our friends, our families: haven’t they got the right to live better than donkeys? Who works in the night for the light of the world? Doesn’t my work entitle me to look after a few people whom I love, as much as it entitles me to drink schnapps? Looking after people is a legitimate spur, every bit as much as alcohol.

  6. As far as the “chance” circumstance that we’re the victims now, that has nothing at all to do with what has gone before. It’s a misfortune, a calamity. But firstly: I’m convinced we’ll get through it; and second, while the world hasn’t forgotten me, am I to tighten my belt till Hitler tightens it for me!?—You live and write like a romantic. That would be OK if the president of the United States was a straight-up guy. But he’s a cheat. A big cheat, like Krueger!3 Bigger! Worse.—If a gangster’s in charge of America, you can’t be Kipling!

  I had to tell you that. Please reply right away. I’m hoping I can be with you in 3–4 weeks.

  Your very old and faithful

  Joseph Roth

  1. Pinker: J. Ralph Pinker, son of a literary agent, and himself a noted literary agent in London.

  2. Wassermann: Jakob Wassermann (1873–1934), highly successful German novelist and essayist who lived on a lavish scale. Author of Caspar Hauser and many other titles.

  3. Kreuger: Ivar Kreuger (1880–1932) owned a match factory in Sweden. When it suddenly went broke, he committed suicide in Paris.

  208. To Stefan Zweig

  Hotel Foyot

  Paris

  2 August 1933

  My very dear friend,

  I’m dripping with heat and work, burdened, strained, oppressed, but I’m working. I think I can be with you in about 3 weeks.

  You should speak on 2 September, which is Sedan Day, and also my birthday, nebbish.

  Your old and faithful

  J.R.

  209. To Max von Hohenlohe-Langenburg1

  Hotel Stein

  Salzburg

  24 August 1933

  Dear friend,

  thanks for your sad letter. You tell me nothing new. You’re right about almost all the general things. But everything personal is completely wrong. Neither Landauer, nor me, nor Ludwig Bauer2 have the feeling that we’re “Jews,” in the sense in which the Nazis are “Aryans.” To a Catholic like myself, my Jewishness is more or less what it would be to a Hasidic wonder-rabbi: a metaphysical affair, high above everything to do with “Jews” on this earth. It certainly has nothing to do with the fact that I can’t, for example, send you money. The true reason for that is this: I’m a beggar. I don’t have money for the next fortnight, nothing for me, and nothing for the 8 people whom I support, who are dependent on me. Of course, like you, I know that Jews are detested everywhere. That’s the way God wants it to be, and so it can’t be any other way. It won’t be the Jews who will overcome Hitler, it will be God. Our individual fates have nothing to do with that.—Incidentally, I never spoke badly of you to Mrs. Kiepenheuer,3 definitely not.—Nor should you get general and individual things mixed up. Don’t seek general reasons for the private behavior of your friends. That way madness lies. It seems to me you think about Jews more than I do. I simply cannot give you any money. I live off alms. I have to write articles to live. I feed off my name, which I gained in the course of writing 14 books. I am not familiar with any Jewish support group. And the Jews that are, get given 5 francs a day. I understand and feel sorry for your plight. You don’t need to explain it to me. Bear it, believe in God, be devout, as I try to be. If you are a “worldly” type, you can hardly complain if we are ground up between Bolshevism and National Socialism.

  Landauer will write to you.

  Sincerely your old

  Joseph Roth

  1. Max von Hohenlohe-Langenburg: Prince Max Karl Joseph Maria zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg (1901–1943 in concentration camp, in Stuttgart), went into exile in 1933. Wrote articles against the Nazi regime. Had already offered his memoirs to Kiepenheuer before 1933.

  2. Ludwig Bauer: a Viennese journalist.

  3. Mrs. Kiepenheuer: Noa Kiepenheuer, wife of the publisher Gustav Kiepenheuer, and a regular visitor to Paris.

  210. To Stefan Zweig

  Hotel Schwanen

  Rapperswil am Zürichsee

  31 August 1933

  My dear friend,

  thank you so much for the days you gave me.

  I sometimes worry if my attitude doesn’t alienate you from me.

  I also have a distinct feeling that you’re not seeing straight, where our respective political views are concerned; and our reaction to one another.

  There is something else too: I can’t quite grasp that you are not content to be an Austrian pure and simple.

  Yours is a conservative and respectful character. All you have in terms of literary and human qualities is old Austria.

  Impossible to imagine you as the son of a Prussian Jew.

  It is imperative that you must love Austria, it will love you back. It is not the same as Prussia.

  I came to know the Austrians and Prussians in the war, when I was seconded to a Prussian division. My active Austrian patriotism dates from that moment.

  I do not expect you to become an outspoken monarchist; that would be too much.

  But you grasp it as well as I do: that’s the only possible salvation for Austria.

  Each one of us is tethered to his past. But you can help us with your precious gifts.

  I was sorry you didn’t want to meet Mr. W.1 I know you avoided sitting at the same table as him. From ethical wisdom, so to speak. But it would certainly have gladdened your heart to see how esteemed you were in that quarter. And when you saw me off, you stood so to speak between Mr. Fuchs,2 the not actual but symbolic representative of the “Left,” and me, the actual representative of the “Right.”

  Or perhaps I’m mistaken. Tell me if I am.

  And what you said about Thomas Mann.3 It can’t be right. We are human. I have never cared for Thomas Mann’s way of walking on water. He isn’t Goethe. He isn’t entitled to such pronouncements. And only the words of one who is entitled can be right.

  Thomas Mann has somehow usurped “objectivity.” Between you and me, he is perfectly capable of coming to an accommodation with Hitler. Only for the time being, it’s been made impossible for him. He is one of those persons who will countenance everything, under the pretext of understanding everything.

  As far as I am concerned, I can’t be objective any more. A man like Mr. Rieger4 is worth a million Thomas Manns. Merely by being, Rieger achieves more than Mann with all his writings. And his Nobel Prize too. I’ve always jibbed at the name “Mann.” I always thought he was more of an “it” myself. Whereas someone like Mr. Rieger is a man. And that’s more than an “author.”

  Please, write to confirm arrival.

  Something went missing from a registered letter to me in Salzburg. It can only have been a postal official. I’m complaining to the authorities concerned.

  Sin
cerely,

  your old J.R.

  1. Mr. W.: Von Wiesner, ministerial councillor, leader of the Austrian legitimists, and a friend of JR’s.

  2. Fuchs: Martin Fuchs (1903–1969), press attaché to the Austrian embassy in Paris, and a friend of JR’s. Following the Anschluss in 1938, he edited a Habsburg journal in Paris, to which Roth contributed. In his last years, he was Austrian ambassador in Paris.

  3. Thomas Mann (1875–1955), German novelist and essayist. Went into exile in Switzerland in 1933, then the USA. For a variety of reasons—class, politics, nationality, self-complacency?—Roth never liked him.

  4. Rieger: Erwin Rieger (born 1889; died 1940 in Tunis), essayist and writer, friend of Stefan Zweig’s.

  211. To Stefan Zweig

  Hotel Schwanen

  Rapperswil am Zürichsee

  5 September 1933

  Dear esteemed friend,

  in haste, thank you for your kind letter.

  So Mrs. Thompson1 is going to try and meet you. I’m seeing her tomorrow in Zurich. I would ask you to make her welcome. There are many things she can do in America.

  I’m never sorry to get any of your letters. I just can’t reply to everything you say. I dread any chance of a misunderstanding.

  Please write and let me know where you’re going. My regards to your dear wife.

  Sincerely

  your Joseph Roth

  1. Mrs. Thompson: Dorothy Thompson (1906–1961), political journalist. Evicted from Germany on Hitler’s orders. Married to the writer Sinclair Lewis from 1928 to 1942. She translated JR’s novel Job. President of the New York PEN Club for a time. See no. 457.

  212. To Carl Seelig

  Hotel Schwanen

  Rapperswil am Zürichsee

  5 September 1933

  Esteemed Mr. Seelig,1

  thank you so much for your kind letter of the 30th last, and for asking me to read in Zurich. Unfortunately I suffer from so-called psychological barriers, I am unable to read aloud in front of an audience, and have thus lost many opportunities of earning money over many years.

  It was very kind of you, however, to make me such an offer, and I would be glad of the chance to thank you personally, if you cared to write me when I could meet you.

  Yours humbly and thankfully

  Joseph Roth

  1. Carl Seelig (1894–1962), Swiss critic, and editor of the works of his friend Robert Walser.

  213. To Blanche Gidon

  Rapperswil am Zürichsee

  20 September 1933

  Hotel Schwanen

  Dear esteemed Madam,

  please excuse the dictation. I am hard at work, and I find it difficult to write detailed letters by hand.

  Thank you for your friendly postcard. I am very sorry we didn’t meet. I hope you and Mr. Gidon recuperated very well in the holidays. Are you and your colleague making good headway with the translation of my novel? I am very disturbed that the book is not yet ready to appear. Please send me news here, and also how your dear husband is faring.

  I was very glad to meet Mr. Poupet in Austria. I hope he likes my poor fatherland.

  In loyal and sincere devotion, and with best regards to your husband

  Your Joseph Roth

  214. To Stefan Zweig

  Rapperswil am Zürichsee

  20 September 1933

  Hotel Schwanen

  Esteemed and dear friend,

  please excuse the dictation.—I have a great favor to ask of you. A good friend of mine over many years, a wonderful human being and a doctor, Dr. Walter Neubauer, has been forced to leave his hometown of Hamburg and his family very suddenly, and is going—which I find quite admirable—to Shanghai. I doubt if I could find anyone else who had connections there, with the sole exception of you. I imagine you know people there, Chinese professors or people in public life there, that sort of thing. Do you in fact know such people, and please will you not take it amiss if I ask you to furnish Dr. Neubauer with two or three introductions? I am very serious. He is an utterly reliable and wonderful person. Compelled to leave Hamburg by the idiotic Aryan laws, even though he is a Christian son of Christian parents.

  Everything else I will write by hand, as soon as I’ve got a bit further with my misbegotten book.

  In loyal friendship your old

  [Joseph Roth]

  215. To Blanche Gidon

  Rapperswil am Zürichsee,

  27 September 1933

  Hotel Schwanen

  Dear esteemed Madam,

  thank you for your kind letter of the 23rd. I am delighted you liked Austria so much. Please give my regards to Mr. Poupet. And, inasmuch as it’s in your power, try and do something for the country to rescue it from Nazi barbarism.

  Dear Madam, I beg you once more, please see to it that my book appears quite soon and in a decent form. I am faring very badly—in financial terms too—and I am utterly reliant on a success in France.

  I am sorry the Reifenberg family are doing badly. On the other hand, it is impossible for me to have any sort of fellow feeling with my friend Reifenberg. Persons who neglect their honor cannot remain my friends. Whoever enters into a relation with the Third Reich, and a public one at that, like my poor friend Reifenberg,1 is struck out of the book of my friends.—Please give my best regards to Professor Gidon.

  I am your humble

  Joseph Roth

  1. my poor friend Reifenberg: JR, as will have been seen, was often impatient with his gentle, sanguine editor, who said of him in turn that “he did not care to understand when it was possible to judge.” Reifenberg, a half-Jew married to a Polish wife, politically left of center, and personally devoted to JR and his memory, was no one’s idea of a Nazi. He attempted, though, with others, to keep the FZ going through the Nazi period as a liberal paper, steering his habitually gentle course, and hoping for change from within, until the FZ was finally shut down in August 1943. Some years after the war, Reifenberg thought to put out a collection of articles from the Nazi period, only to come to the dispiriting conclusion that the opposition supposedly encoded in them was so faint and obscure as not to exist in any real sense.

  216. Stefan Zweig to Joseph Roth1

  [postmarked: London,

  30 September 1933]

  Dear friend,

  we feel extraordinarily well here, I have rented a nice apartment, work all morning until 3 o’clock in the library, and then at home; the people are pleasant and considerate, the climate positively helpful to one’s work, I am sure you would feel much better here than in Paris, or in your solitude. I haven’t smoked now for four weeks, it helps me no end, and what makes me breathe even more easily is that I hear no news of home.2

  Sincerely your

  Stefan Z.

  11, Portland Place

  1. At this point in the collection, some of Stefan Zweig’s letters to Joseph Roth are also included.

  2. Really a bizarrely, almost provocatively insouciant note to go from someone in Zweig’s position to someone in Roth’s.

  217. To Stefan Zweig

  Rapperswil

  2 October 1933

  Hotel Schwanen

  Dear, esteemed friend,

  congratulations on your cure. I well know how hard it is for you, and I know too that part of you is thinking not just of you, but also of me. I am not so strong as you. I don’t write. I can’t write. I am indifferent. All my friends in the business have dropped me.

  Excuse the harshness and brevity. I’m sad that you didn’t go to Paris. You could have done a lot for Austria. But perhaps you could still do that in Paris, behind the scenes. A few days ago, I met Mr. von Wiesner. He came directly from the emperor.1 The empress is in Italy. Foolishly, she is trying to prevent a marriage with an Italian princess, which the Italians ar
e apparently trying to bring about. I tried to prove the foolishness of her endeavors. But in Austria, the situation is that Mr. Dollfuss is tacitly ready to acknowledge the monarchy. As soon as the fait accompli has been created, he will agree to it. Our plan is to convey the dead emperor2 from Lequeto to Austria, and with him the live emperor. We need 30,000 schillings, which for the time being we don’t have. Austria is in the bag. There is no cause to worry about National Socialism there.

  My dear friend, you must commit the entire weight of your public person to Austria. Believe me, I know, I can feel that it is of great importance for you to appear as an Austrian. At a stroke you will set aside everything you have suffered and continue to suffer in Germany. We need a Romain Rolland3 for Austria. You know I’ve never been one for glib phrases. And you know I don’t need to reach for them when talking to you. On the contrary. My friendship for you is such that I would rather say disagreeable things to you, than agreeable things.

  Yours sincerely

  your Joseph Roth

  1. emperor: the pretendant Otto von Habsburg.

  2. dead emperor: Karl I (1887–1922), emperor from 1916 to 1918, when he was forced to abdicate.

  3. Romain Rolland (1866–1944), writer and essayist, pacifist, later Communist. Was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1915, which he made over to the Red Cross. A close friend of Stefan Zweig’s, who very much admired him. By a species of triangulation Roth is trying to recruit Zweig for the monarchist cause.

  218. To Stefan Zweig

  [Rapperswill]

  9 October 1933

  Dear esteemed friend,

  in haste, and in an effort to calm you down: how can you overestimate the importance of that printed bullshit! In this world it’s a matter of absolute indifference—unfortunately—what is written about us or by us. There’s a handful who know, and they know everything. All the others are blind or deaf. Haven’t you got that yet? The word has died, men bark like dogs. The word has no importance any more, none in the current state of things. I had an interview in the Mois1 where they said I was an anti-Semite. Do you suppose I cared? In the space of three days, even a true word is dissipated. And a lie is even quicker. There is no “public arena” any more. Everything is shit.